Boo Hoo! MoveOn Under Cyber Attack

Over the weekend, someone unleashed millions of artificial requests at our servers, preventing legitimate traffic from getting through, and temporarily shutting down our website. It’s what’s called a Denial of Service Attack, and this was the largest one we’ve ever faced. Over 15 years, through wars and heated elections, we’ve never seen anything like this.

It was the equivalent of someone firing a shot-gun through our window—clearly aimed to intimidate us and interrupt our work. Tens of of thousands of MoveOn members and other visitors were unable to organize on our site—sign petitions, plan events, run campaigns—for hours as our ace tech team raced to fight the attack and get the site back up.

We’re back up and running with new defense measure in place, but while this was the biggest attack we’ve faced, it won’t be the last. We must quickly beef up our defenses so MoveOn members can keep running campaigns that speak truth to power without fear.

Will you chip in $5 today to help make sure MoveOn is on and strong enough to withstand the next attack when it comes?

While we were under attack, MoveOn staff couldn’t access some of our most essential tech tools. Over 45,000 MoveOn members were unable to reach their petition signers and campaign data. Over 300 groups met this weekend to kick off a massive anti-fracking campaign—and all those groups were briefly locked out of our systems.

Paralyzing MoveOn for a few hours was a big blow. Taking us out for a day would be a disaster. Our 8 million members are everywhere, fighting bravely to change this country, working on timely campaigns—they can’t wait for the tools and back-up we provide. We need to be ready for the next attack—and we will be.

With your support, we will:

Recover the costs of the extra tech time we already put in to recover from this most recent attack

Acquire new tools that’ll help us recover more quickly next time this happens

Continue to invest in best-in-class technology to power our campaigns

Will you help us protect ourselves from future malicious attacks and continue to invest in powerful tools that are changing the country?